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What are they smoking?

I was just checking my referrals (as you do) and I noticed a bunch of people visiting from the Disco blog. Curious I thought, so I clicked through to see where I’d been mentioned. Turns out it’s midway down a very narrow long blog post about the development of Disco and its humble beginnings. What I read next was something of a surprise and I’ll reproduce it here:

I’m of the firm belief that when someone harms you are insults you in any way, you should give them the benefit of the doubt. Smarter men than myself have said that you should afford tens of excuses to anyone, and make one up and believe it to be true should you not be able to think of them. Without this philosophy, a lot of the posts that I had prepared (that would have ultimately fought fire with fire) would’ve been posted. For those not in the loop, the controversy started with a handful of people hating on Disco for being a different user experience.

The piece I wrote on the death of the HIG is linked from the word ‘handful’ and next the one TUAW article which didn’t sound like a PR piece for them and Paul’s piece on the delicious generation. They go on to mention that they got some excellent feedback from some ‘smart developers’ but they neglect to link to any of them.

What’s shocking is they consider this ‘hating’. Apparently when someone points out the elementary UI flaws in your app or criticises you for your wall to wall media coverage and hype of a buggy beta that’s now called ‘hating’. For the record I don’t hate Disco, hell I even bought a license because I wanted to support their efforts. That doesn’t mean I have to join the chorus of people ooing and arring over their pretentious UI though and to be called a ‘hater’ for offering constructive crticism frankly makes them look like the unprofessional ones. Any app that gets put in the spotlight as much as Disco was is going to be picked to pieces – and rightfully so – that’s the job of the media and frankly the PR echo-chamber Mac media failed miserably on this count and it was left to the blogosphere to even the balance. It’s thanks to the so called ‘haters’ that Disco is a better app today than it would have been if no one had criticised it. Not one of us developers writes perfect code or produces perfect UIs, the way we improve our software is through criticism, be it from our users or from our peers. Hopefully Disco’s developers will realise this and understand that trying to polarise people isn’t helpful.

Note the title of this article is obviously a play on the fact that Disco smokes I ain’t accusing anyone of using drugs 😛